Have tmux windows inherit `activate`d anaconda env

Question

For convenience and given that activate-ing an environment is crazy slow, I want to activate an environment and then start a tmux session.

I want all new tmux windows to also have the environment activated.

I want different tmux sessions to be able to support different anaconda environments.

How do I go about this?

Are there any gotchas such that this isn't supported by anaconda / miniconda?

Answer 1

What I've done to address this problem is:

• In .tmux.conf, copy CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV environment variable to session environment

  set-option -ga update-environment 'CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV'
  

• In .bashrc, reactivate the conda environment if one was activated:

  if [ -n "$CONDA_DEFAULT_ENV" ]; then                                                                                                                                         
      __conda_reactivate                                                                                                                                                       
  fi
  

  Note 1: this assumes that __conda_reactivate is available because of conda init or similar. Note 2: in older versions of conda, it's _conda_reactivate (just one leading underscore).

This is faster than conda activate <env> and also different environments can be used before creating different tmux sessions.